DPI’s systems currently support multiple companies with hundreds of thousands of distributors and gross sales well over $1 billion annually.

Amid some positive experiences from DPI staff, I noted some GlassDoor reviews of DPI explicitly suggested problems with Booth’s style of management.

“Had potential… just CEO is a type A monster”

“As long as you don’t ever disagree with the CEO, you’ll do great!”

“Great talent, very poor leadership”

In 2012 the state of Maryland fined Viridian $60,000 for “false and deceptive marketing practices.”

In 2015 Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory authority announced it was reviewing Viridian’s contracts, contract renewal, customer notification and enrollment procedures.

Also in Maryland, a class-action lawsuit was filed against Viridian and it’s parent company, Crius Energy.

The suit claims Viridian uses a “fraudulent and deceptive bait-and-switch sales model” and that Viridian associates “form a retail pyramid” that yielded the company a 30 percent profit margin in 2014, to the tune of $33.7 million.

As of December 2017, that lawsuit is ongoing. A Status Conference report filed October 18th, 2017, reveals settlement negotiations between the parties are ongoing.

deceptively advertis(ing) low initial rates for energy followed by variable rate plans that are tied to the market rate when, according to plaintiffs, customers end up paying four, five, or six times more for their energy.

This is a combination of three separate class-action lawsuits, which were combined into the Maryland class-action referenced above.

Read on for a full review of the Viridian MLM opportunity.

Viridian Products

Viridian offer residential and business utility services (electricity, natural gas and solar), as well as access to a travel-booking engine.

Details on utilities are based on where a potential customer resides, with pricing not provided unless a customer signs up and provides Viridian with personal information.

The Viridian Compensation Plan

A generation based matching bonus is also available, as well as additional performance-based bonuses.

Viridian Affiliate Ranks

There are fifteen affiliate ranks within the Viridian compensation plan.

Along with their respective qualification criteria, they are as follows:

Associate – sign up as a Viridian affiliate

Active Associate – be MLM commission qualified (see below)

Senior Associate – generate 40 PV a month and recruit and maintain at least one MLM commission qualified affiliate on both sides of your binary team

Consultant – generate 70 PV a month and maintain at least one MLM commission qualified affiliate on both sides of your binary team

Senior Consultant – generate 100 PV a month, recruit and maintain at least two MLM commission qualified affiliates on both sides of your binary team and generate and maintain at least 140 GV in weaker binary side volume over a rolling 4 week period

Executive Consultant – generate 130 PV a month, maintain at least two MLM commission qualified affiliates on both sides of your binary team and generate and maintain at least 250 GV in weaker binary side volume over a rolling 4 week period

Director – generate 160 PV a month, recruit and maintain at least three MLM commission qualified affiliates on both sides of your binary team (three must be Consultant or higher ranked) and generate and maintain at least 500 GV in weaker binary side volume over a rolling 4 week period

Senior Director – generate 190 PV a month, maintain at least three MLM commission qualified affiliates on both sides of your binary team (four must be Consultant or higher ranked) and generate and maintain at least 1000 GV in weaker binary side volume over a rolling 4 week period

Executive Director – generate 220 PV a month, recruit and maintain at least four MLM commission qualified affiliates on both sides of your binary team (five must be Consultant or higher ranked) and generate and maintain at least 2000 GV in weaker binary side volume over a rolling 4 week period

Partner – generate 265 PV a month, maintain at least four MLM commission qualified affiliates on both sides of your binary team (three must be Director or higher ranked) and generate and maintain at least 5000 GV in weaker binary side volume over a rolling 4 week period

Platinum Partner – generate 310 PV a month, recruit and maintain at least five MLM commission qualified affiliates on both sides of your binary team (four must be Director or higher ranked) and generate and maintain at least 10,000 GV in weaker binary side volume over a rolling 4 week period

Diamond Partner – generate 355 PV a month, maintain at least five MLM commission qualified affiliates on both sides of your binary team (five must be Director or higher ranked) and generate and maintain at least 20,000 GV in weaker binary side volume over a rolling 4 week period

Ambassador – generate 400 PV a month, recruit and maintain at least six MLM commission qualified affiliates on both sides of your binary team (three must be Partner or higher ranked) and generate and maintain at least 50,000 GV in weaker binary side volume over a rolling 4 week period

Platinum Ambassador – generate 450 PV a month, maintain at least six MLM commission qualified affiliates on both sides of your binary team (four must be Partner or higher ranked) and generate and maintain at least 100,000 GV in weaker binary side volume over a rolling 4 week period

Diamond Ambassador – generate 500 PV a month, recruit and maintain at least seven MLM commission qualified affiliates on both sides of your binary team (five must be Partner or higher ranked) and generate and maintain at least 200,000 GV in weaker binary side volume over a rolling 4 week period

Promotional Pay

From industry leading global mission trips, to fun and relaxing incentive trips, to short-term cash promos, to recognition contests, Viridian offers you many ways to increase your earnings, expand your opportunity and experience the joys of owning your own business—all while seeing the world, and changing the world.

A Viridian trip is truly a life-changing experience.

You’ll find yourself rolling up your sleeves and helping a community on a high-impact service project, experiencing a rush of adrenaline on an exhilarating adventure, or just enjoying a life of luxury and relaxation at a world-renowned resort.

Often, you’ll do all of these things on the very same trip!

Captioned photos in the Viridian compensation plan suggest the Promotional Pay is an annual event differs from year to year.

Joining Viridian

Viridian affiliate membership is $299.

An affiliate can also opt to sign up with Travel Light membership for $249, which MLM commission qualifies an affiliate (as long as they continue to pay $39.99 a month for Travel Light membership).

The Viridian website claims the $249 membership is a “limited time offer”. How long Viridian have offered the $249 membership however is unclear.

Additionally, Viridian affiliates are able to purchase up to three compensation plan positions (binary team).

Every newly enrolling Viridian Associate will have an opportunity during their initial enrollment to create their Associate account with 1 business unit or 3 business units.

Three business units is a great way to leverage your Viridian income since you can significantly increase your income potential on your future efforts within your Binary
Lineage.

This presumably adds to the initial cost of Viridian affiliate membership, however no pricing is provided.

Note that the Viridian compensation plan also mentions a Personal Website Subscription.

This appears to be an ongoing cost tied to certain commissions.

Despite searching I was unable to ascertain how much Viridian charge for a Personal Website Subscription.

Viridian marketing material suggests the website fee is essentially mandatory, as it includes a replicated Viridian, Travel Light, and solar power marketing website.

A Personal Website Subscription is also required for access to the Viridian’s Catalyst mobile app;

Easily share tools, training, videos, social media shareables and more with prospects and customers directly from your phone. Send a custom link in seconds that connects back to your marketing page.

Conclusion

Utilities based MLM companies typically have extremely complex compensation plans due to the varying providers and rates tied to the locale of subscribed services.

Viridian avoids this pitfall with a pretty straight-forward compensation offering.

A good deal of volume generated is non-specific based on utility usage, but percentages of used volume are universal (often percentages differ based on provider and this can get confusing fast).

As to the utilities themselves, it’s hard to ignore three class-action lawsuits and regulatory action pertaining to Viridian’s pricing.

That the class-action lawsuits appear to have been filed by affiliates suggests there might be an issue with the retail viability of Viridian’s utilities offering. More on that in a bit.

With respect to the Travel Light booking engine, I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary here. This appears to be a regular travel MLM offering.

At $99 and then $39.99 a month you’re looking at having to recover just shy of $540 in the first year and $479 every year thereafter.

The trap here is travel might be booked just to recover the ongoing membership spend, leading to sunk cost fallacy versus actual savings.

Travel Light also appears to be Viridian’s defacto monthly autoship option. Although entirely optional, it’s probably not a coincidence that 15 PV is both the minimum for MLM commission qualification and how much an affiliate’s Travel Light monthly fee generates.

While you are not required to be a Viridian customer, we strongly recommend you begin using the products yourself and create your own testimonials!

The Trio Bonus puts a deadline on generating 15 PV a month and recruiting two others who do the same, and I believe this will be the reason most, if not all Viridian affiliates will have Travel Light membership.

That in itself isn’t a problem, but there might be an issue if there’s a distinct lack of retail Travel Light memberships being sold and maintained.

Realistically companies with energy accounts large enough to matter likely already have a relationship with their provider, so this definitely going to be a tough market to break into. Energy is already competitive, commercial energy even more so (as evidenced by the difference Viridian pays between residual and commercial energy accounts).

While initially a Viridian affiliate might be able to solely self-qualify for MLM commissions, PV doesn’t let up as they increase in rank.

With relatively low PV values generated per individual spend, the idea is obviously that sales beyond an affiliate’s own purchases are required.

It’s just a shame this isn’t instilled from the beginning, so as to guarantee new Viridian affiliates are retail customer focused from the get go.

Two points I particularly took issue with in Viridian’s compensation plan were the Personal Website Subscription fee and ability to purchase additional business centers.

The Personal Website Subscription fee appears to be a monthly affiliate fee packaged as some sort of exclusive web service.

An MLM company should be providing basic marketing tools to affiliates as part of their membership. If Viridian wish to charge for than fine, but don’t pretend not having basic business tools is a choice for anyone serious about building an MLM business.

Call it what it is, a monthly affiliate fee, and be done with it.

The ability for a Viridian affiliate to purchase additional business centers is perhaps the biggest compensatory red-flag.

To recap, a new Viridian affiliate is able to purchase up to two additional business centers when they sign up.

This option is only available upon initially signing up, requiring a new affiliate to pay more to earn more without potentially understanding what they are paying for.

The sole qualifying factor here is money paid by the affiliate, which as far as regulation goes is an unmistakable example of “pay to play”.

I’m not a fan of additional compensatory positions but I understand why they exist. If a top affiliate has maxed out the compensation plan, rather than continue to increase the ceiling of the plan, additional business centers can keep leaders working on directly building their business.

The key word there is “top leader”, as I believe these are the only affiliates who require additional centers. Certainly additional centers should not be pitched to new affiliates as a means of increasing income potential, for doing nothing more than paying more money.

I get the feeling Viridian are hedging their bets here, knowing full well that most affiliates aren’t going to be taking advantage of the additional centers.

According to Viridian’s latest Earnings Disclosure Statement (May 2016 – April 2017), 88% of affiliates were making $124 or less a month.

Interestingly of the total Viridian affiliate-base, 61% don’t qualify for MLM commissions at all.

I’m not too sure what the story is there, considering 15 PV is all that’s required to be a “Qualified Associate”.

As a prospective Viridian affiliate, I’d be wanting to ascertain whether my potential upline actually has retail customers (preferably utilities customers, as commissions are more stable with a regular monthly bill).

The first thing you can ask is if the affiliate qualified for the Trio Bonus. And if they did, was it through their own Travel Light membership purchase and the same of those they recruited, or did they actually sell utilities?

Beyond that you can ask them what rank they are, match that with the corresponding PV and ask how they’re generating that each month.

If it’s downline affiliate volume and their on service subscriptions, that’s an indication that Viridian’s offering might not be competitive enough in a retail environment.

This is important because without significant retail sales, an MLM company is operating as a pyramid scheme.

I’m trying not to read too much into the Viridian class-action lawsuit until it’s resolved (or more likely settled it seems), but it’s certainly hard to ignore.

Approach with caution.

Update 6th December 2017 – Unknown to me at the time this review was published, Viridian today announced it will be abandoning its MLM operations as of March, 2018.

On Friday Viridian announced to their top leaders there would be a restructure and this was released today.

Dear friends and Viridian Associates,

This past Friday, we had an opportunity to meet with many of your field leaders as we shared news of a significant change in Viridian’s go-forward plans.

Together we celebrated and honored the amazing impact this company has had on our communities and the environment, as well as the memories and friendships that have been created because of the unique culture of Viridian.

We took the opportunity during last night’s Empower Call to once again share those memories. If you missed last night’s call, you can listen to the critical business updates and the memories shared now via the replay: (removed).

Below are just a few of the milestones we honored – achievements that each and every person who has been a part of Generation V should be very proud of:

– More than 10 billion pounds of carbon avoided from going into the air

– More than $100 million in commissions paid

– More than 7,800 people reached the rank of Director or above with Viridian and grew personally and professionally

– 1,085 people traveled the world on a Viridian reward trip

– Nearly 6,000 volunteers at 328 local service projects hosted by more than 200 local community organizers in our local towns and communities

– More than 12,600 trees planted in badly deforested areas around the globe

– 286 rural families across the globe receiving light and electricity for the first time, from solar systems installed on their home

Now, after 8 years of this incredible growth, positive impact and contribution to the energy and direct selling industries, Viridian International Management (“Viridian”) is undergoing a significant business transition and will be focusing more exclusively on energy sales as of March of 2018.

While the company will no longer support the continued growth of the network marketing channel, this transition will allow the company to continue to honor the ongoing commission commitments it has to its dedicated Associates, ensure no disruption to ongoing service of energy or travel customers, and allow for the continued enrollment of clean energy customers.

From now until March 1, 2018, there will be no changes to your Viridian business and you will be able to continue to access all services, sponsor Associates, enroll customers and receive commissions as you always have.

In addition, you’ll be able to continue to increase your Paid-As Rank, for the purposes of maximizing your long-term earnings with Viridian.

Viridian was a reader review request I had on my list for over a year. I only got around to begin researching it earlier this week. Not sure how I was supposed to have intel on an annoucement made after I published the review!

Anyway sounds like they’re thanking their affiliates for the energy customers and abandoning them after March next year. With that in mind dunno why anyone’d bother continuing to build a Viridian business.

I suppose at least they’ll continue to pay existing commissions though, although the EDS revealed hardly anyone is making money. Thanks for the heads up!

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